Day 3 began on a different note for me as I went out to the track in the morning and got my first “Shanghai workout.” While everything went according to plan, what I enjoyed seeing was the host of people either walking or running around the track, doing Tai chi, or another activity. The majority of these people were older people as well. In addition to this observation, the point that my workout went without any “hiccups” I found slightly surprising. I say this because I came with the preconceived idea that the air quality would be so bad, that I may have trouble breathing or could run the risk of attaining some type of breathing problem. I laugh now that I think about that because I found literally no difference in the air quality that I experienced versus that in the states. Whether or not I just caught Shanghai on a good day is still up for question, but all in all, this was a prejudice of mine that was successfully refuted.
We then made our way to the awe inspiring Shanghai World Financial Center. The number of high rises, all creatively unique and beautiful in their own right in this Pudong New area made Houston’s downtown high-rise district look not-all-so impressive. We even ran into the very same art piece that we have on campus at Rice down in-front of the mall located in this area (I will attach the picture). As you may see in all the pictures, this entire area was very beautiful and filled with many futuristic looking buildings.
The first session of the day was located at a place called the Sino Finnish Center, which is home to a NGO called JUCCE, or Joint US-China Clean Energy. This is by far my favorite session thus far because it pertained to my very own topic with much detail. The founder and director of the organization first spoke to us and gave a us a brief outline of what they focus on which included: nutrition education for kids, keeping China from having the “bling dream” but embracing what she called the “China dream,” and also training Chinese governmental officials how to build a sustainable city. The last point of focus is what I thought the most interesting approach mainly because being able to orchestrate something like this could possibly only occurring within a centralized government system like China has. We then had a professor of urban planning design share with us his work and personal philosophies on development. Through everything he shared, what intrigued me the most was his general perspective of always looking ahead to what the future holds for the development and prosperity of Shanghai. While they are in the midst of taking care of some very serious environmental issues, he mentioned how this is a period that the city has to get through in order to continue to progress.
After the session, we had group discussion session with Professor Fang, Professor Jing, and everyone else in the lab at a coffee shop at an urbanization innovation space called KIC or knowledge and innovation center. This was a cool space because it very much embraced the sustainable innovation of urban areas that was talked about in the early session. You can check out the very livable space in the pictures I post for this post.
